So to preface this is posted in literature.cafe’s meta community but this
question is primarily aimed at generally anyone in the lemmyverse who is NOT a
cisgender man no matter what instance they may be in. The purpose of this thread
is to present a stage for conversation for those willing to contribute, and
although cisgender men are not excluded I kindly ask you to be mindful of the
fact what this thread is meant for and try to avoid talking over others here. If
you are a cisgender man interested in learning and seeing how lemmy can improve
like I am: welcome. For those who are here to cause issues or talk over others
though, you will be promptly removed. I do not know the demographic data of
lemmy, but I would wager a large portion are male. And over the past few weeks I
have witnessed women on numerous occasion discuss their discomfort on here.
Reddit very much had a very “bro-y” feeling culture for many, that felt like a
barrier to entry to many women. With lemmy, there’s a potential to break this.
But the answer really is how? Lemmy has begun to develop into its own culture
already independent of Reddit quite rapidly, and it’s been awesome to see but I
am wondering if there’s a way we can push it a step further and implement ways
to make the platform more welcoming to women than Reddit previously did.
Thoughts?
Conversation ongoing over there, inviting anyone who wants to participate to please consider sharing their thoughts if they are willing to. If you wanna post in the original thread from your instance copy and paste the link into your instances search panel
As I said in the thread, if you aren’t comfortable posting feel free to DM me here or on matrix and I can post anonymously for you.
The internet should be free from social bias of all sorts, including sex and gender
It’s not though.
It wasn’t when that document was written, and it’s not now.
Hiding our gender doesn’t stop the bias and it doesn’t stop us seeing the bias. All it does is make it less likely to target us specifically, because people are making incorrect assumptions about who we are.
I nearly always use my name online and I don’t keep my gender a secret. On the few occasions I have been anonymous though, all it has meant is that people assume I’m a man, which again, is not the same thing as “no bias”
Adding to that… I was there in the 90s, I used the electron, the switch, and the baud… and the IRC.
My nick was gender neutral, but from time to time, I heard women comment on how unfriendly the Internet was. One day, out of curiosity, I entered a somewhat popular IRC channel with a fake nick, “natalie” IIRC… and got instantly DDOSed by something like 100+ private chat windows with all sort of “openings” from the male population.
Yeah, the 90s are not a good model to follow in this regard. On the other hand, if you haven’t got 100+ DMs yet, maybe we’re going in the right direction after all 🤞
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It’s not though.
It wasn’t when that document was written, and it’s not now.
Hiding our gender doesn’t stop the bias and it doesn’t stop us seeing the bias. All it does is make it less likely to target us specifically, because people are making incorrect assumptions about who we are.
I nearly always use my name online and I don’t keep my gender a secret. On the few occasions I have been anonymous though, all it has meant is that people assume I’m a man, which again, is not the same thing as “no bias”
deleted by creator
Adding to that… I was there in the 90s, I used the electron, the switch, and the baud… and the IRC.
My nick was gender neutral, but from time to time, I heard women comment on how unfriendly the Internet was. One day, out of curiosity, I entered a somewhat popular IRC channel with a fake nick, “natalie” IIRC… and got instantly DDOSed by something like 100+ private chat windows with all sort of “openings” from the male population.
Yeah, the 90s are not a good model to follow in this regard. On the other hand, if you haven’t got 100+ DMs yet, maybe we’re going in the right direction after all 🤞
Thank you